


Where the Shadow Falls

by enginue



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canon Compliant, Explicit Sexual Content, Extended Metaphors, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Joseph Kavinsky-centric, M/M, Pining, Recreational Drug Use, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24999409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enginue/pseuds/enginue
Summary: What did your mom do when your goldfish died?It’s the beginning of July, it’s the end of the world. For Kavinsky, there’s nowhere to go but down.Set between chapters 45 and 53 ofThe Dream Thieves.
Relationships: Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch
Comments: 21
Kudos: 50





	Where the Shadow Falls

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: gaps are filled here, but nothing is fixed.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing  
And the first motion, all the interim is  
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.  
**_Julius Caesar_ (2.1.65–67)**

Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,  
The seat of desolation, void of light,  
Save what the glimmering of these livid flames  
Casts pale and dreadful?  
**_Paradise Lost_ (1.180-83)**

  


Kavinsky was in the dream place.

It was silent. It always was, in the beginning: not the living quiet of a real forest, but the expectant hush of an empty church, a place that was waiting for God. Around him, the trees seemed to hold their breath. When they began to shift, Kavinsky would know he’d been noticed. When they spoke in unison, it would be time to wake up. They had not noticed him yet.

In the sun-dusted clearing beyond the spread of green shade, Ronan was beginning to stir. Kavinsky could see his brow furrow as the shape of him crystallized on the overgrown grass, bending into focus like a snapshot. In the sunlight, he looked a little overexposed. Maybe, thought Kavinsky, as Ronan pushed himself to his feet, maybe he’d fucked it up. Maybe his mind was worn out from dreaming; maybe the drugs had, as promised by guidance counselors and daytime television alike, melted holes through his brain. Watching Ronan approach him, Kavinsky found himself supremely unbothered by the prospect of substance-induced mental collapse. The trees began to whisper.

“Lynch,” he said, and it didn’t matter that it came out like a supplication. Ronan had his hands on Kavinsky’s chest, pressing him into the cool trunk of a tree, backlit by sun like a degenerate saint. A bird cried in the distance, high and harsh. Kavinsky felt the heat of Ronan’s exhale on his lips.

In the dream, Ronan’s mouth was slick and hungry and improbably sweet, and he touched Kavinsky as though he’d been made for that express purpose, which, of course, he had. Still, Kavinsky shivered under his hands. When Ronan crushed their hips together, heat scorched over Kavinsky’s nerves and up his spinal column, lights popping behind his eyes. With Ronan’s mouth on his throat, Kavinsky's head fell back. The canopy of the forest was swaying now, chanting. Under Kavinsky’s fingers, Ronan’s skin began to bristle ominously. At the base of his neck, Ronan’s teeth grew sharp. Kavinsky closed his eyes. _Wake up. Wake up._

He did, gasping, on his bare mattress, a plum-colored bruise ripening at his throat. Summer heat drifted without urgency through the open window, and with it the wind-up-toy whirr of cicadas, the lobotomized machine-gun repetition of the sprinkler system. On his bare skin, Kavinsky could feel the cool breath of the A/C mixing with the humid air. Beyond the roof’s dark overhang, a shard of midday sky glowed like an empty television screen. 

Kavinsky scrabbled a hand through the drift of tiny, patterned ziplocks and loose pills and candy wrappers littering his nightstand until his fingers landed on an orange prescription bottle that might have been from a pharmacy if not for the blank label and the biohazard glyph on the cap. A green tablet rattled out into his palm. He swallowed it dry, and unconsciousness sucked him under like a riptide. 

In a blink he was back at the edge of the clearing, watching Ronan Lynch materialize on the grass.

\---

The first thing Kavinsky ever pulled out of a dream was a Martenitsa, the same one his grandmother had given him the previous spring. He was six years old, drowsing restlessly in the silence and new carpet smell of his vast, unfurnished bedroom, dreaming of home. Kavinsky was not yet well-acquainted with America, but what he’d seen so far had overwhelmed him with its size and speed and industry—here was a kingdom of glass and steel, swarming with a people who did not meet each other’s eyes. Homesickness burned in him like hunger. When he woke holding the dolls of yarn, he’d pressed them to his face and found that they smelled like his grandmother, like perfume and good food and Nivea cream. Kavinsky thought they were a gift from God.

By the time his mother found out, he was ten and knew better. “Don’t tell your father,” she’d snapped needlessly, and there was fear in the look she’d leveled at Kavinsky’s newest accidental acquisition—a river stone, still wet. “And keep your door locked, for God’s sake.” 

He kept his door locked. 

Kavinsky’s first forgery, the first thing he ever dreamed on purpose, was a handgun: twin of the weapon whose cold muzzle had bitten into his cheek while his father accused him, in a snarl, of stealing money from his desk. In the dream, he was in a wood where the trees spoke a language he could not understand. He thought of his father’s pistol: heavy and cold and smelling of gun oil. _Please_ , he’d asked the trees, first in Bulgarian, then in English. _Protect me_. And they did. Not chance, but intention. Not magic, but art.

For the next four years, between skipped classes and parties in the city, Kavinsky refined his craft. He learned how to fight and shoot and drive, in that order. He learned how to smile slow and easy when his mind was saying _run run run_. He learned and relearned that reality, having been fashioned by men like his father, was violent and meaningless. In this dangerous world, dreaming earned him safety, then power. When the forest began turning its gifts into nightmares, Kavinsky learned how to steal.

Then his father caught him.

It was his mother who suggested Kavinsky dream him back. Blood was spattered over the splintered door frame of Kavinsky’s bedroom, bright and abstract as some shit in the MoMA, but the vast majority of what had recently been his father was crumpled messily on the beige carpet, one lifeless index finger still caught in the trigger guard of a pistol. _Dead_ , thought Kavinsky, and then, _oh God_. His ears were ringing; his hair and shoulders were white with plaster dust from the wall above his bed. His mother repeated herself, and it was only shock that kept him from shaking her by the shoulders and screaming in her face, because it was senseless, what she was saying. _Dream him back_. The wood was Walmart, not the Garden of fucking Eden.

Except, when Kavinsky crept over the leaf-strewn forest floor, he found that Dimitar Kavinsky had appeared just like any other dream thing: exactly as he’d been imagined. Black suit, reek of cologne, gleaming rank of gold rings that Kavinsky could still feel the crack of over his cheekbone. He took the wrist of his unconscious not-father gingerly and with a vague feeling of foreboding, but he only hesitated for a moment before waking himself up. 

It worked. By luck or desperation or pseudonecromantic miracle, it worked. He and his mother realized soon enough that the copy wasn’t perfect—it was somehow crueler than the original, and a little harder on the liquor—but who would divine the truth? It was this, Kavinsky realized, that would keep them safe: the impossibility of their secret, the brazenness of it. Later, in Virginia, when his mother drunkenly alluded to his poor father—her words—in front of his friends, Kavinsky only sneered.

“What,” he said afterward, when Proko kept darting him furtive glances when he thought he wasn’t looking. “You’ve never been in a shoot-out with your old man?” 

(Of course Kavinsky knew the rumors. He’d started them all.)

It was the same but different when Proko overdosed in the basement. Same _oh God_ moment of horror, same panic, but this death was not Kavinsky’s doing—there was, he reminded himself, no reason to feel guilty. Nor was there any reason to go through the trouble of bringing Proko back, except that Kavinsky had become fond of him, except that he could. 

In the blind panic after his father’s death, there had been no time for research, and as true as the copy appeared, Kavinsky suspected there would be a few questions if his father ever had to go in for surgery. For Proko, though, Kavinsky stayed up late doing lines and studying diagrams and watching autopsy videos on his laptop. With the green pill on his tongue, he held it all in his mind: muscle and bone, big ears and chipped left incisor, the way Proko held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger like a joint, and how he blew smoke in Kavinsky’s face when teased about it. When Kavinsky woke, Proko was beside him on the bed, snoring lightly, pulse slow and even under Kavinsky’s fingers.

It was, perhaps, this memory that made Kavinsky think he could replace Ronan Lynch. More likely, it was the acid cocktail of desire and fury simmering in his blood as the roar of Dick’s dream car receded into the humid distance. Either way, as soon as the dream place could afford it, Kavinsky stretched out in the driver’s seat of the Mitsu and washed a green pill down with a mouthful of beer. He was angry and desperate, and the result was a poor forgery—a hair too tall, a shade too buff, and entirely too obliging—but Kavinsky fucked it anyway, senseless in the smothering heat, on the sun-scorched grass of the fairground and the hoods and back seats of various imperfect Mitsubishis. The replica did lines off the dashboard and tasted like cherry Twizzlers, but it was about as alike to Ronan as a teddy bear is to a grizzly, which was to say not at all. Before dawn, he shot it in the back of the head with the Dream Killer and buried the body in a nondescript corner of the fairground. 

After that, he let his ersatz Ronans melt back into the dreamscape that spawned them. It had hardly been more than a day, but there must have been dozens already: a disjointed army of them congealing in the long grass and sinking into darkness, rising and falling, one after the next, scarred and raw-knuckled and clothed in black. 

None of them were right. 

The build was easy enough to conjure, and the tense, arrogant posture, the cut of the jaw, the velvet bristle of shorn hair. Kavinsky knew Ronan’s outfits and scars. He’d captured the ice cap eyes, the soot spread of lashes, the insomniac lick of shadow beneath them. If you cut these goldfish, they’d bleed. Open-chested on an autopsy table, they would fool even a medical examiner. 

The physical forgery, in short, was flawless; it was everything else that was wrong. Kavinsky’s Ronans were either too chatty or too aloof, earnest or cynical, crude or refined. At best, they implied the genuine article, circled it like dead planets alight with the fire of an absent star. At worst, they degenerated into screaming, chthonic terrors midway through the dream. Often, they were too much like Kavinsky himself, trotting out all the same grinning nihilism that sounded so clever in Kavinsky’s head, but which on Ronan’s lips only bored him. The artificiality of these forgeries nagged at him as it had not with his father, as it never did with Proko. Even when all they did was fuck, he knew, in spite of himself, that the eagerness of the counterfeits was nothing more than an echo of his own frustrated desire. Not that it mattered.

Maybe it was the difficulty of the task that snared him, a kind of ultimate challenge in the God-game of dream forgery. Maybe it was the sex. Maybe it was the persistent, back-of-the-mind feeling that if he could dream a perfect Ronan Lynch, then he could unlock the secret of winning the real one, or he wouldn’t need the real one, or he’d stop wanting him at all. 

Kavinsky didn’t like to think too much about why, all those boring details. The salient point was that he wanted, and with a surge of breathless urgency after Ronan roared back to King Dick in that perfect copy of his laughable car. The feeling thrummed through him like blood as he lay in his boxers on his undressed bed, cycling in and out of consciousness for hours. 

He took a pill and dreamed of Ronan—of his body and sharp tongue and steady gaze—lurched back into reality, fumbled another pill to his lips, got back on the ride.

\---

At some point, in spite of the drugs, real sleep must have taken him, because the next time Kavinsky woke, his bedroom was vague with blue shadow and low voices. His mind felt muzzy with the dregs of dreams, lingering like an afterimage, rendering the whole dim scene surreal. Proko was reclining on the far corner of the mattress, face washed in the synthetic glow of his phone. At the edge of every thought lurked Ronan Lynch. He may as well have been in the room.

“You awake, man?”

“Yeah.” Kavinsky’s voice scraped against the dry husk of his throat, and he pushed himself up onto his elbows. Shoulder to shoulder on the floor, Swan and Skov were sharing a joint; he let his eyes unfocus over the little red sun of it, nodding and flaring and fading in the dark space between their faces. “Where’s Jiang?”

Proko jerked his chin toward the corner, where a slim shadow was talking low and rapid into a phone. “His mom got his report card in the mail.”

“Bad luck.” Of the pack of them, Jiang was the only one whose parents really gave a shit about his grades. 

“Coming out tonight?”

“You know it, babe.” From the mess on his nightstand, Kavinsky produced a loose cigarette, which he lit, and a ziplock-encased gram of white powder, which he cut into lines on the cover of his World Civ textbook. The coke blew clear through the refuse in his head and skittered down his spine. He sucked in a deep drag from his cigarette, tipping his face up on the exhale; above him, the column of smoke sighed toward the ceiling, pale as a ghost in the dying light.

“You about ready, asshole?” Swan’s frat-boy drawl was lazy with weed. A low chorus of giggles erupted from where he and Skov were lying. Kavinsky hopped off the bed and mashed his bare foot against Swan’s face, then danced out of range of his grasping fingers. 

“I’ve gotta shower first, man. I still smell like your mom.”

\---

Kavinsky’s hair was still damp when they hit the streets. Cocooned in the hot roar of the Mitsubishi and the hard, brilliant glow of the cocaine, Kavinsky had no interest in dreaming of Ronan Lynch. He wanted to find him here, in the nightmare of reality, drag him out of Dick Gansey’s fortress and break his own hand on the bones of Ronan’s face. He wanted a fight: an excuse to touch him, to wrestle him to the ground. With a shiver, he remembered Ronan’s fist in his face, the blood on his knuckles theatrically bright in the pitiless glare of his headlights. _Here’s your substance_. Kavinsky cranked up his music and sped toward the warehouse.

The BMW wasn’t there. 

It didn’t seem to be anywhere else, either: not in the parking lots of Nino’s or the Catholic church, not prowling along any of the emptying streets in town. Piled into a booth at the fast food chain by the interstate, Proko, Skov, Swan, and Jiang ate french fries and sipped fizzy dark cola spiked with bourbon, but Kavinsky couldn’t stop darting glances through his washed-out reflection in the smudged plexiglass window, looking for round headlights in the dark. Everything reeked of grease and ketchup, and the stale pop song percolating through the speakers seemed to grate over a raw nerve at the base of his skull. The drugs were wearing off.

In the restroom, Kavinsky did a couple of lines off the counter and splashed cold water on his face. The coke drip numbed the top of his throat and lingered, bitter and chemical, at the back of his mouth. Under the film of pharmaceutical light, the bruise on his neck was grotesque, like an image out of a medical textbook, or the dark stigmata from some satanic ritual. He saw the door open behind him in the dirty mirror. It was Proko.

“You alright, man?”

“Just refueling,” said Kavinsky, displaying the baggy of powder. “You want?” 

Proko grinned and caught the bag in midair. While he did a line, Kavinsky lit a cigarette and sent Ronan a battery of text messages, one after the next. Proko tipped his head back, pinching his nose. Kavinsky gave him a drag off his cigarette, then pocketed the coke.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

It was late enough now for racing, no lights on the roads but the carnival spill of sodium lamps and traffic signals. Ahead of them, the dead drag stretched out just as it had when Kavinsky had last raced on it, the night he’d taken Ronan home with him. The breeze rolling through the open window was cool over Kavinsky’s arms and shuddered to the sound of the engine. He found that if he kept his gaze on the red eye of the traffic light, on the orange-lit street before him, he could almost convince himself that it was the BMW idling in the next lane, Ronan behind the wheel. The cross-traffic signal went yellow. He slid his window shut with the flick of a finger.

At speed, the rounds of tangerine streetlight slurred together, the console’s thin glow receding into the dark periphery. His music slammed over the rising howl of the engine, and though he fumbled the shift to fourth, the Mitsubishi zipped ahead with inevitable speed. Kavinsky pictured Ronan in the other car, and then, closing his eyes briefly to better conjure the image, he pictured him in the passenger seat, just a few inches to his right. With his vision full of the unfurling road, he could almost feel the heat of a body next to his own.

Long after Swan’s headlights had disappeared from the rearview mirror, Kavinsky kept peeling through intersections, winding into the hills where only the white blade of his high beams cut the black. He drove instinctively, recklessly, taking the curves too fast, tires skidding sideways, headlights arcing over guardrail and broken glass. In his mind, Ronan was right there beside him, all tense lines and poorly bridled aggression. He let the memory of the accident slide through his body—light kick of the gun up his arm, Ronan’s hands fisted in his shirt, kinetic crush of metal, gasoline on the air like a whispered doomsday prophecy—let the longing for it fill him up and empty him out.

He considered driving through the night, into the tomblike darkness of the mountains. He considered wrecking the Mitsubishi. In the end, he slid into the empty parking area of a scenic overlook and turned off the engine. There were a few loose pills in the center console: two greens and a red. He swallowed the lot.

It was nighttime in the dream place. The black sky was punched through with stars, but the forest was suffused with the low, nonsensical glow of twilight. Above, the spreading trees were silent and watchful as sentinels. Close by, Ronan was unfolding from a crouch.

Kavinsky had dreamed this Ronan, and so he knew, in the seconds it took for the distance between them to close, what was coming. Still, the force of the blow snapped his head sideways, and he had to regain his balance before slamming his own fist into Ronan’s jaw. As the impact shuddered up the bones of his arm, a jab caught him sharply in the hollow below his sternum, and he doubled over, gasping. Ronan’s knee came up hard, and Kavinsky heard it crack into his nose with a swift bloom of pain.

It was a dirty fight, the only kind Kavinsky cared for, and he was outmatched. One of his teeth had been knocked loose and his nose was bleeding freely; the taste of iron was heavy on his tongue. Laughing, he spat redly in Ronan’s face, but Ronan didn’t wipe it away, just took him down, methodically, landing blow after blow. Under Kavinsky’s back, the ground was cool and damp. He was thinking about the first time his father had hit him—not with a belt or the back of his hand, but a proper punch to the face—how stunned he’d been, how stupid he’d felt for it. On his face he could feel Ronan’s fists slipping in the slick of his blood, across his hips was the warm weight of Ronan’s body. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

There was the sound of a scuffle. Kavinsky opened his eyes to find Ronan stumbling backward, struggling in the grip of some concealed assailant. Kavinsky knew enough about nightmares to know how this ended—namely, at the hands of whatever Silent Hill-esque creature was dragging Ronan away—but when Ronan twisted to the side, Kavinsky saw that his attacker was not a monster at all, but a second Ronan, distinguishable from the first only by the absence of Kavinsky’s blood on its face. The new Ronan slammed the bloodied one into a tree with one hand, and, with a feeling like missing a step in the dark, Kavinsky watched as a silver gun materialized in the other. Time seemed to lag as understanding hit him. Then it sped to catch up.

It was the real Ronan Lynch who was forcing the gun’s gleaming barrel into the mouth of his double and pulling the trigger. The counterfeit’s body jerked, went slack, and crumpled to the ground. Ronan tossed the gun aside. Kavinsky began to clap slowly.

“My hero,” he drawled, and Ronan rounded on him, eyes glittering. Kavinsky realized that he’d been wrong to think that this Ronan and the forgery were identical.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“You know me, man. I was just having a nice, peaceful walk through my dream forest when this asshole comes at me out of nowhere.” Kavinsky jerked his chin toward the lifeless counterfeit and grinned through the lie. “For a minute I thought he was really you.”

Ronan narrowed his eyes. “You’re so full of crap.”

“What, you trying to tell me you’re not like that? Don’t bullshit me, Lynch. I know you.”

“You don’t know shit. That thing was a rabid dog; I don’t fucking kill people for no good reason. Not even you.”

Kavinsky waved inclusively at the trees around them, the impossible light. “This is a dream, man. You can do whatever the fuck you want for no reason at all.” He stepped closer, bristling with savage pleasure, lowering his voice. “You wanna kill me? I was going to let you, before you pulled you off and shot him. It’s not too late, though. I’ll give you another chance.” He retrieved the discarded gun and pressed it into Ronan’s palm, holding his gaze, curling Ronan’s fingers around the grip with his own.

Ronan took a step back. The weapon in his hand was dark with mirrored shadow. Kavinsky raised an eyebrow and bared his bloody teeth in his most mocking smile. With a feeling of delirious recklessness, he stepped back into Ronan’s space. 

“Come on, Lynch. It’s easy. Give me your best shot. Let’s see what you can do with that gun.”

“You already have,” muttered Ronan, frowning.

Kavinsky laughed softly and leaned in, his heart throwing itself against his sternum over and over, a bird battering itself on a windowpane. His mouth was very close to Ronan’s ear. “Give me something else, then.”

Ronan didn’t move, but his breath went shallow, and Kavinsky heard it die entirely when he caught Ronan’s wrists lightly in his fingers. The gun fell with a muffled sound.

“What’s wrong, man?” Kavinsky was dragging his thumbs up the irregular skin at the inside of Ronan’s forearms, sketching his heart’s blue mainline through the valley of his inner elbow. He felt Ronan’s shuddered exhale on the side of his neck. “This is your dream. It’s anything you want.”

“Fuck you, K.”

Kavinsky turned to meet Ronan’s eyes, but his gaze caught on his mouth instead. “Ah, Lynch. I thought you’d never ask.”

When Ronan kissed him, it did not feel like a dream. It felt real, devastatingly so: realer than the charred skeleton of the real Mitsubishi, the aseptic veneer of his cardboard house, the hallucinatory Virginia heat. It was real like the fractured moment of almost crashing at a hundred miles per hour, when the reality of reality closed in on him so fast he couldn’t dream himself out of it. Ronan’s tongue dipped into his mouth, and Kavinsky slid his hands up to the hot skin of his neck, drawing him in deliberately, lips parted, head spinning like he’d never been kissed in his life. When he pulled away, Ronan’s mouth was dark with Kavinsky’s blood. 

Slowly, Ronan fisted his hands around the straps of Kavinsky’s shirt and backed him up until he felt smooth bark on the bare skin of his shoulders, the slow-motion echo of the wreck’s aftermath so clear that Kavinsky could almost smell the gasoline. Without breaking eye contact, he let his fingers drop to the waistband of Ronan’s jeans, resting them there for a few seconds, acutely aware of the catastrophic oil-spill spread of Ronan’s pupils and his own unsteady breath. He traced an index finger over the button closure and down, until Ronan made a soft, dry sound and his hips jerked forward. 

“Are you always so easy for it,” asked Kavinsky, with a lazy smile and his heart in his throat, “or is this just for me?”

Ronan stepped in with that thin smile of his, dragging a palm cruelly over the front of Kavinsky’s jeans. Heat licked down Kavinsky’s thighs, and his eyes fell shut as he hissed out a breath. “I don’t know,” retorted Ronan, low and mocking, and Kavinsky could feel the words shiver over his mouth. “Are you?”

_No._

In the same way that there was nothing but dreaming, there was nobody but Ronan Lynch, which was to say that there was real life and other people, but both were so disappointing that Kavinsky hardly saw the point. He couldn’t have picked his teachers or classmates out of a lineup, couldn’t remember the names of half the girls he’d fucked, but his head was so stuffed full of Ronan, from his dishevelled school uniform to the way the variegated light of a traffic signal candied his face, that he sometimes thought there wasn’t room for anything else. He wondered if Ronan knew; some suicidal part of him _wanted_ Ronan to know, but Kavinsky was not stupid enough to tell him. Instead he worked Ronan’s jeans open and floated his lips over the soft juncture between his jaw and the delicate cast of his ear. So low he could only hear it in his head, he whispered, “Don’t flatter yourself, Lynch.” Ronan shivered.

Jeans falling in a tangle around Ronan’s ankles, caught on his boots, Kavinsky skimmed a hand up the underside of his cock, trailing fingers over the insubstantial fabric of his boxers. Ronan dropped his head onto Kavinsky’s shoulder and made a coarse, incoherent noise that climbed an octave when the gesture was repeated. Reeling with the proximity of Ronan’s body, with his own mind-snuffing arousal, Kavinsky felt as though he’d come if Ronan so much as breathed on him. 

It felt, absurdly, like uncharted territory, and Kavinsky had to remind himself that he was an old hand at this. There had been girls—there were always girls—and the flimsy fake Ronans, and even Proko, once; but that entire line of memory merged confusingly with the flat gloss of pornography before spitting him back into the moment— _this_ moment—where Ronan Lynch’s teeth were in Kavinsky’s shoulder, his fingers opening Kavinsky’s jeans, black shirt catching for a moment on his chin. Taking a backward step, Ronan nearly toppled in the snare of his pants before Kavinsky caught him by the hips and flipped their positions, pinning him against the tree. In the bad light, he was dangerous, eyes dark as if he’d taken something, and it was with a feeling of Tarkovskian cinematic doom that Kavinsky leaned in to lick his own blood from Ronan’s mouth. 

He bowed his head to lap from the well of black shadow under Ronan’s jaw, to press his open mouth against the flickering skin at the side of his throat, all salt and deep-drumming blood. A bruise at the pulse point, a bruise at the heart, a bruise between two right ribs like the mark of a lance, and there, just below the elastic waistband of his boxers, a final red star. The scrape of Ronan’s breath was loud over the clamor of Kavinsky’s pulse, louder still when he dragged his face over and down, locating the damp spot on Ronan’s boxers with the part of his lips. He wanted to rid Ronan of his shoes and pants, wanted to fuck him with his mouth, to climb into his skin, to swallow him whole. Impatiently, he yanked out Ronan’s bootlaces, then skimmed his fingers up the backs of Ronan’s thighs, tonguing his cock through the slit in his boxers until he could catch the salt-slick end with his mouth, mind splintering over the sound of his own name in Ronan’s throat like some final prayer of the damned. Ronan’s hands landed on the sides of Kavinsky’s head, pushing him away, and then he was kneeling, too, his feverish eyes right there, right there the flush laid high on his cheeks. “Let me,” he murmured, pushing Kavinsky’s boxers down with his jeans. “Let me touch you. Christ, Kavinsky.”

It must have been by some dream magic or the fucking grace of God that Kavinsky didn’t come at the first touch of Ronan’s fingers on his cock, every square millimeter of Ronan’s skin flaring on his own like a struck match over dry kindling. Amid the flurry of heat and breath and quiet, loaded gesture, Kavinsky felt Ronan push the fingers of his free hand through his hair and pull him in, licking his mouth open; he choked on a groan when their cocks collided in the inexorable medial shift of their bodies. A hand on his chest propelled him backward, and then Ronan climbed onto Kavinsky’s lap in a straddle, gathering them together in a loose fist and rocking his hips so they grazed each other again and again, tips sliding together in the mix of their precome. There was no dream or reality, reflected Kavinsky dazedly, no timeline in any universe in which he could endure more than half a minute of this. 

Ronan’s name was in his mouth, just like that: _Ronan_. Also, _God_ , and _please_ , and a handful of English and Bulgarian expletives, all of them jumbled and reprised and breaking over the jagged surface of his breath. He could not look away from the texture of Ronan’s skin, the rapid grade to red at the edge of his mouth. With a tug of his fingers, Ronan tipped Kavinsky’s head back and caught his torn lower lip with his teeth, then kissed him slowly, like a confession. They were breathing the same dark air, gripped by the same fragmenting rhythm; they were, remembered Kavinsky dizzily, having the same dream. With a soft litany of closing vowels that Kavinsky felt on his own tongue, Ronan’s body jerked, a marionette in inexpert hands, and he came hot and slick over Kavinsky’s stomach and cock and his own clenching fist. Kavinsky could feel himself unstringing in slow motion, burning from the inside like the first Mitsubishi. As the air whisked from his lungs and Ronan’s name stuck in his throat, he thought, nonsensically, of the ouroboros—no, the double ouroboros—of devouring and being devoured, spark and flame and smoking wreckage imploding in his mind as heat screamed through his body in reverse and he spat a single broken syllable into Ronan’s open mouth.

Ronan was still kissing him, one hand at the back of Kavinsky’s head, the other finding his face, damp smearing over his jaw. When he pulled back, Kavinsky caught Ronan’s wrist in one hand and held it still while he licked the come from his fingers, limning slowly with his tongue the webbing stretched between palm and thumb, watching Ronan’s mouth go slack. Kavinsky grinned and let himself fall back to lie on the ground.

Above him, Ronan was like marble, gazing down with his eyes sunk in shadow. His hands sketched over Kavinsky’s chest, fingertips skipping lightly over his ribs, noting the crest of a hip bone, tracing the long arc of a scar. “What’s this from?” he asked softly.

“Switchblade.” His father had been teaching him how to fight when he’d pulled the knife on Kavinsky, an object lesson. He’d been twelve. “Looks worse than it would have if I’d gotten stitches.”

Ronan nodded, then laid the pad of an index finger in the hollow just south of Kavinsky’s collarbone. “And this?”

“Cigar.” Mouthy at fourteen. White fire like ice before the heat hit.

“Jesus.”

Kavinsky grinned crookedly, “Like a kiss from the sun, Lynch.” He passed a hand over Ronan’s forearms and pitched his voice high with mock-concern. “What’s this, man?”

“Bad dream,” said Ronan, smiling with half of his mouth. Kavinsky was fingering the leather at his wrist, running his thumb over the bands—one, two, three, four—

He started over, and again, but each time it was the same. 

Curious, the way horror hits the body first, the nightmare timelapse spread of it from the belly to the chest and out through the limbs, while the mind spins its wheels, waiting for the meaning to resolve. Ronan had a curious look on his face, expectant. He twisted his wrist and caught Kavinsky’s hands in his own, their fingers lacing together. Palm to palm they stared at each other for a long, still moment, and then Ronan’s mouth quirked. “Try to keep up, K.”

Kavinsky came to in the darkness and silence of the Mitsubishi, retching. His hands were empty.

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to my great friend and incredible beta, Dwodynia, who waited very patiently while I shambled through this thing ( _It’s just going to be a oneshot_ , I said. _I’ve got it all planned out_ , I hastened to add. _It’s just a couple days from being done_ , I promised, over and over, for more than a month.), soothed my considerable anxiety about writing smut, yelled about all the right things, helped me weed out the shit that made no sense, and was in every respect a perfect human.
> 
> The line, “Here’s your substance.” is taken from chapter 27 of _The Dream Thieves_. “What did your mom do when your goldfish died?” is from chapter 35 of the same. Credit for both goes to Maggie Stiefvater.
> 
> Credit to Will Shakespeare and John Milton, respectively, for the epigraphs.


End file.
